In an age full of irony, ideas about sex in the liberal west have broken into two categories. The first is the Cartesian, mechanistic view of sex. It is intolerant and views sex as plumbing. Oh, love might sneak in by accident, but by and large when it comes to the sexual act human beings are biologically driven. To strive for anything else is like holding the ocean back with a stick.
This was once the Catholic view. It is now the secular view.
Receive news alerts
These days, the Catholic Church offers a richer, deeper, and, yes, sexier view of human sexuality. It is evident in the new book At the Heart of the Gospel: Reclaiming the Body for the New Evangelization by Christopher West. West is an expert on the Theology of the Body, the remarkable series of teachings about human sexuality delivered by John Paul II in the early 1980s.
"Our sexuality is not merely one aspect of our humanity," West writes. "Rather, our sexuality illuminates the very essence of our humanity as men and women made in the divine image."
As West notes, it is the job of the new evangelization about the theology of the body to fight puritanism -- however, in our age puritanism has come to mean the puritanism of liberalism, which holds that the body is a thing, an object separate from the soul. Puritanical attitude "make us feel that there is something inherently wrong with our creation as bodily, sexual creatures, and that the path to ‘holiness' is to reject this about ourselves in the name of living a 'spiritual' life." Liberalism is really no different from the gnosticism of early Christianity, which also divided the body from the soul.
One of the dogmas of the sexual left is that increasing "awareness" and "education" about sex -- an education that speaks nothing of love -- is healthy. They've been saying it for forty years, through AIDS, divorce and new STDs. They've even ben saying it before that. When the playwright and socialist George Bernard Shaw announced that discarding Victorian sexual reticence there would be a corresponding drop in lasciviousness -- or "sex appeal." He was met with disbelief by G.K. Chesterton: "There must have been hundreds of men in history, from pagan slave owners to anarchical art students. There must have been all sorts of eastern despots in their harems and freak decadents in their hotels, who could do anything they liked in the way of decorum or indecorum, and have impropriety on as large a scale as they chose. Did it result in these cases in people becoming sexless, or insensible about sex of indifferent to sex appeal? Does it ever occur in any such cases?"
One of Chesterton's contemporaries also saw the danger of liberalism and also the beauty of sexual love, was Dietrich von Hildebrand. Von Hildebrand was arguably the greatest lay Catholic of the 20th Century. Hildebrand was the son of a famous sculptor, Rudolph, who created many of the famous fountains in Munich. In 1925, while he was a professor of philosophy at the University of Munich, Von Hildebrand gave a series of lectures to the Federation of Catholic Students' Unions. The topic was chastity.
Von Hildebrand reiterated St. Augustine's three goods of marriage, proles (increasing friendship between spouses), fides (fidelity) and sacramentum (sacrament). But then Von Hildebrand attempted to expand on them: "There exists, however, a profound relation of quality between the bodily union and that psychological and spiritual factor of specifically matrimonial love formulated under the terms mutuum adjutorium (mutual assistance) and fides (fidelity) as one of three ends."What von Hildebrand was saying, in essence, is that sex was about more than procreation -- "we should rather speak of the meaning of sex than of its function....The act of wedded communion has indeed the object of propagation, but in addition the significance of a unique union of love."
Indeed, he said,
"Even if the intention to reproduce were invested with the noble purpose of giving the Church new souls, that intention by itself, to the exclusion of specific wedded love, could not organically unite physical sex with the heart and spirit, nor would it posses the power to inform from within the distinctive nature of sex, alloyed as it is by a tendency to overcome the spirit, and thus transform it into a positive good."
By "the tendency to overcome the spirit," Von Hildebrand meant orgasm. "The spiritual person," he said, "is in danger of being 'swamped' by the orgasm." Sex involves "a flinging away of the self" -- that is, "when it is not a divinely sanctioned surrender of self."
When the divine purpose and function of sex is not present, Von Hildebrand claimed, what can often surface is the ugly side of sex: "the moment the sexual act is not viewed from within, in its divinely ordained function, but appears in its external aspect, the stark vital brutality, the ugliness of certain features, makes itself powerfully felt."
Von Hildebrand would not be the only Catholic of the time reassessing the Church's strict views about sex. In 1930, Reverend Felix M.Kirsch, a professor at Catholic University, published the book Sex Education and Training in Chastity. Today, that title alone would be enough to elicit sarcasm and hostility from educators (even at Catholic schools). But Kirsch's book is wise. "The sense of modesty is one of the guardian angels given us by God for the safeguarding of chastity," he writes.
But Kirsch was no prude. He criticizes "exaggerated demands made in the interest of modesty." He rejects the claim made by one expert that letting young boys and girls acquaint themselves with sexual organs "will surely lead to grave temptation during adolescence." Kirsch also notes that there have been Christian denominations who have banned talk of the commandment against adultery for fear that talking about the sin would in fact cause children to think about sex, and thus be led into sin.
The alternative to this was not graphic sex education without morals; Kirsch warned against sex ed that became "merely informational and . . . would reject moral education as a useless appendage." Kirsch called for a realistic approach to sex that avoided "prurience and prudery." Christ himself spoke "naturalistically", saying in the Gospels that what comes from the heart out of the mouth is more important than what goes into the mouth, which "passes through". Kirsch quotes an Irish author who says of the Virgin Mary, she "spoke no prudery, for she knew no sin." Kirsch adds that Victorians ) and even those living in the 1930s when the book was published ) may have been scandalized by Elizabeth's salutation to Mary: "Blessed is the fruit of they womb."
Kirscsh's colleague at Catholic University at the time was psychologist Rudolph Allers. Allers was born in 1883 in Vienna. He was a student in the last class taught by Freud at the University of Vienna. Allers would eventually reject Freudianism, writing a book called The Successful Error debunking his former teacher. Allers came to the United States in 1938, and got a job at Catholic University. In 1940, he published Character Education in Adolescence.
For Allers, sex was not about procreation, as the Church held for centuries, or about body parts, as the sex educators of the 1960s and after would hold. It was about the "longing for completion." This was a natural and spiritual completion to be found in true love, of which sex was only a part. Freud had found "all love being originally and basically sexual. The fact that no trace of sexuality may be found either in maternal love or in the love between friends, does not trouble the psychologist. Of course, adolescents feel strong sexual urges. But as they are just coming into realization of themselves as persons, there is an uncertainty, an anxiety and shyness." He goes on:
"This shyness is due partly to uncertainty in face of the new problems and the lack of self-reliance, and partly to the nature of sexuality itself, which is not simply a longing for union but contains, however dimly, the knowledge that union means, in a way, giving up one's self. Even in the crudest form of merely sexual desire, there is still a trace of this - that sexuality imports not only attaining satisfaction, but also giving something away."
Giving something away. It's the theme that runs through Christopher West's At the Heart of the Gospel and the theology of the body. After the oceans of free condoms, the endless hook-ups, the devastation of AIDS, it turns out that the place that truly loves sex and understands your body is the Catholic Church.
Mark Judge is a columnist for RealClearReligion and author, most recently, of A Tremor of Bliss: Sex, Catholicism, and Rock 'n' Roll.
Read Full Article »